The Ultimate Guide to Strong Arms

The Ultimate Guide to Strong Arms

There’s a lot of complicated advice and contraptions out there that are supposed to make your arms buff. The truth of strong arms is much simpler, though. The equipment and trainers at our Virginia Beach gym are designed to give you the simple essentials of strengthening your upper limbs.

Let’s start by dispelling a common myth about strong arms: they do not necessarily mean bulging muscles!

Your guns and other showy muscles will definitely get bigger as your arms get stronger, but the exercises used to isolate and grow specific muscles aren’t the ones that will make your arms the strongest overall.

Strong arms demand exercises using three basic movements: pushing, pulling, and swinging. Each of these movements uses multiple muscle groups in tandem. When major muscle groups work together, arms can achieve their greatest potential for performing work. Let’s look at each of these in turn.

1. Pushing Exercises Any exercise that pushes weight away from the body using the arms is going to use major muscle groups such as pectoral muscles, triceps, deltoids, abs, and possibly lats.

The best known exercises of this type are the bench press and pushup. Pushups exercise the core better than the bench press. If pushups are too difficult, check with a personal trainer to learn modifications that will allow you to build up to a full pushup.

To work your shoulders more, try military presses where you press free weights upward over your head. To work your lats and triceps more, try dips.

Other great pushing exercises that work muscles groups throughout the body are the get-up plank and the clean and press windmill. Personal training at our gym in Virginia Beach can show you how to do these more complex exercises correctly.

2. Pulling Exercises Pulling exercises strengthen major muscles groups like biceps, deltoids, back, trapezius, and lats, and rowing is one of the simplest. Grab a dumbbell, kneel over a bench, and lift the dumbbell up toward your body to work your biceps and back.

Working your lats is trickier, as you need to pull weight down toward you. You’ll need a cable machine, found near the free weights at our health club in Virginia Beach, to do lat pulldowns.

3. Swinging Exercises

Swinging exercises fall in the hard-to-classify category, somewhere between pushing and pulling. Swinging tends to engage the core (abs, back, lats, and hip flexors) to stabilize your torso and hips, an added bonus to your workout.

One great push-like exercise is triceps swings. Lying on your back, hold dumbbells straight out past the top of your head, then swing them upward until your arms are straight up.

Another is kettlebell swings and variations thereof. Consult one of our trainers to make sure you achieve proper form. In addition to your arms, kettlebell swings will work your back, core, and legs for a total body workout!

That’s it – these are the basic movements that will make your arms buff! The rule of thumb is to be sure to incorporate at least one push, one pull, and one swing exercise into every arm routine for a well-rounded workout.

You can discover more arm-strengthening exercises at iNLeT Fitness by consulting with one of our certified personal trainers. You’ll learn proper form to avoid injury and overexertion, and the proper intensity and duration for your level of fitness and goals.